Battery passport: what stays a trade secret from 18 February 2027
7 min read
Whoever is closing the cell supply specification this quarter for the next battery range rarely stops to think where the paragraph on cathode formulation will end up eighteen months from now, once it has been signed, filed, and folded into the plant’s ordinary technical archive. Yet a precise part of that paragraph will have to appear, readable by anyone who scans the QR code on the battery that specification produces. Another part, just as precise, can stay out of public view — though not out of everyone’s view. The line between the two is not drawn by whoever writes the specification: the regulation already draws it, item by item, and whoever manufactures or assembles only has to find out where it falls inside their own technical file.
Article 77 does not set one access level. It sets three
Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 of 12 July 2023, published in the Official Journal of the European Union L 191/1 of 28 July 2023, sets the date and the scope in Article 77(1): “From 18 February 2027 each LMT battery, each industrial battery with a capacity greater than 2 kWh and each electric vehicle battery placed on the market or put into service shall have an electronic record (‘battery passport’).” We checked this against the consolidated text updated to 13 August 2026: no corrigendum has touched the date.
Article 77(2), however, does not treat the passport as a single open file: it splits it into three tiers. There is information “accessible to the general public” (point (a), Annex XIII, point 1); information “accessible only to notified bodies, market surveillance authorities and the Commission” (point (b), points 2 and 3); and information accessible only to “any natural or legal person with a legitimate interest” (point (c), points 2 and 4), for purposes the regulation lists exhaustively: dismantling, remanufacturing, second life, recycling, or making an individual battery available to energy aggregators.
Who exactly falls into that last category, though, nobody has bindingly said yet. Article 77(9) required the Commission to adopt, by 18 August 2026, implementing acts “specifying which persons are to be considered persons with a legitimate interest” and to what extent they may “download, share, publish and re-use” that information, precisely to “ensure that the accessing and processing of information in the battery passport that is commercially sensitive is limited to the minimum necessary.” Several specialised trackers report that, as of the time of writing, no such act had been published even in draft: we have not verified this directly against the Commission’s official register, and we flag it as such below. What does not change is the date of 18 February 2027: it takes effect regardless of whether that list of readers exists yet.
The line runs straight through the cell’s own data sheet
Annex XIII, point 1(b), places among the publicly accessible information “the material composition of the battery, including its chemistry, hazardous substances present in the battery, other than mercury, cadmium or lead, and critical raw materials present in the battery.” The same public list includes the carbon footprint, responsible-sourcing information drawn from the due-diligence report, and recycled content — the environmental and supply-chain layer of the file, which we already covered when we wrote about where the battery passport’s data actually originates, is largely destined to become visible to anyone.
Point 2 of the same Annex moves the boundary deeper: what stays “accessible only to persons with a legitimate interest and the Commission” includes “detailed composition, including materials used in the cathode, anode and electrolyte” (point (a)) and “part numbers for components and contact details of sources for replacement spares” (point (b)), alongside dismantling diagrams and safety measures. The difference is not between chemistry and non-chemistry: it is between the list of substances present — which must come out — and the exact recipe, which materials in which electrodes, that can stay inside the perimeter of whoever has a recognised reason to see it. The same cut applies to individual-battery usage data (point 4): state of health, charge cycles, incidents — never public. The same principle already applies under the Data Act, for connected products: a trade secret is not protected by declaring it when the request lands, but by having mapped it beforehand, field by field.
Motor Valley manufacturers face all three fronts at once
The case is not abstract for Emilia. In the Motor Valley district — the cluster of high-performance vehicle builders and their first-tier suppliers, at the heart of precision manufacturing around Modena, Bologna and Reggio Emilia — all three categories under Article 77 coexist: electric two-wheelers falling under LMT batteries, hybrid and electric cars with their traction batteries, and industrial storage systems above 2 kWh in the same plants. For a company designing or assembling in that district, the choice of what goes into the public tier and what stays restricted does not concern one single model, but the entire catalogue, with a different specification for each supplier and a different formulation for each line.
Today, in most companies, the entire technical file for a cell — composition, suppliers, process tolerances — carries the same stamp: confidential, one single block, filed and forgotten under a single access right. From 18 February 2027 that same file will have to come out split across at least four drawers, with a written criterion behind every line deciding which drawer it belongs in. Whoever does this now, field by field, reaches the date with a file already built and ready to sit behind a QR code. Whoever puts it off finds out the hard way, in front of the person asking: when a customer, a notified body or a competitor reads that code and finds a blank field — or worse, a field that should never have been there.
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Where we stop
We do not give legal advice on whether any specific data point qualifies as a trade or industrial secret: that is an assessment for in-house counsel and the manufacturer’s certification bodies, formulation by formulation — we have written elsewhere about the measures Article 98 of Italy’s IP Code requires you to be able to prove. On the missing implementing act under Article 77(9), we relied on reporting from specialised trackers, not on a direct check of the Commission’s own register: if the act has since been adopted or published in draft, the pool of persons with “a legitimate interest” moves from reporting to a binding list, and the classification will need rereading accordingly. Nor have we verified what procedure applies to challenge the classification of a specific data point across the four tiers of Annex XIII: the regulation assigns market surveillance to national authorities, but a dedicated complaint route on this specific point does not emerge, on our reading, from the consolidated text we reviewed.
The two axes, applied
Complying. In our system, the duty under Article 77 becomes a control that reads the technical file for every cell — specifications, PLM, the due-diligence report — and proposes, line by line, which of the four Annex XIII tiers each data point falls into, with the reasoning logged and ready to show a surveillance authority on request. When the implementing act on legitimate interest finally arrives, the classification updates on the same underlying data set, without anyone having to start over from a blank sheet.
Deciding. The same system brings supply specifications, PLM and legal counsel together into a single operating model, on which AI agents propose the classification with a human operator in command who approves or corrects it — not only for the battery passport, but for every future product that will have to separate, item by item, what becomes public and what stays a trade secret. For large enterprises, defence, government and healthcare. Always in two modes: on-premises, on autonomous machines that need no deep integration into the client’s network, or dedicated cloud, with a dedicated VPN and a data centre in Italy — always with shared management.
From the first session, at no cost, comes the dated map of your cell’s technical file: which fields currently marked confidential already fall, under the regulation, into the public tier, and which genuinely stay out of reach. It stays yours even if we do not go on together. Talk to one of our engineers.